Very insightful! Useful, I might even say. Good work!

This reminded me, in the very first OpenDev (the only one I participated in) I seem to recall growth mechanics worked completely differently. It was tiered, where between like -10 and 10 food surplus your city would not grow, then between 10 and 50 it would grow slowly, and from 50 to some other number it would grow quicker, and so on. Whatever happened to that? I liked how it encouraged you to grow your food surplus. Did people find this confusing or something?

It led to a lot of frustration in playtesters because the top tier was actually quite low and easy to obtain. So extra food past that was wasted infrastructure / labour.  It also made for a lot of busy work for people trying to max min or speed run the game, checking every town was at the bottom of whatever tier it could obtain every turn.

The system also tied city growth to the size of the city, so past a certain population size you got 1 person per turn flat. more food or bigger cities did nothing. Result: You had to build armies of scouts from your biggest towns and resettle them to small towns. tedious work.

Thanks for this work Goodluck!

It's very interesting.

Thanks for the work, really interesting. Especially in regards to the growth rates. Will need to check again in detail and while playing :)

bFudg3 wrote:

Thanks for the work, really interesting. Especially in regards to the growth rates. Will need to check again in detail and while playing :)

Thanks

So, I am trying to get a good-sized city (20 territories, 200-300 population) to get more than 1 pop per turn. Is there a way to receive more than one pop per turn on a single city and up to what threshold ?

Otherwise it seems that you will need to deatch territories to allow them to grow separately and then reattach them later.

Melliores wrote:

So, I am trying to get a good-sized city (20 territories, 200-300 population) to get more than 1 pop per turn. Is there a way to receive more than one pop per turn on a single city and up to what threshold ?

Otherwise it seems that you will need to deatch territories to allow them to grow separately and then reattach them later.

Cities can not naturally grow that many pops before the turn limit is reached. You have to do this such as absorb other cities, attach/detach outpotst or use various tricks to create more population such as building units, upgrade them into more pop costly units and disband them for more population.

Thank you for the reply Goodluck.

Have you done any investigation on what will be the optimal time to attach/detach such cities ? I can make plenty of districts to house the new populations but am wondering what will be the best threshold to attach again a new territory to your main city. Naturally, having more population can give you a lot of bonuses depending on your cultural wonders and legacy traits. :)

Melliores wrote:

Thank you for the reply Goodluck.

Have you done any investigation on what will be the optimal time to attach/detach such cities ? I can make plenty of districts to house the new populations but am wondering what will be the best threshold to attach again a new territory to your main city. Naturally, having more population can give you a lot of bonuses depending on your cultural wonders and legacy traits. :)

No, but for fastest growth it would likely be grow one population, attach and then detach but that cost alot of influence.

I think I have found an optimal strategy for growing your population. You start employing it in the Medivial Era and can become more efficient in the Contemporary era.

What you need :

- Chivalry tech for the Hamlet.
- Social Housing tech for +16 population slots in all Outposts and Cities.

- Inherited land under Land Rights civic. This will allow you to Attach/Detach outposts with Gold instead of Influence.

If you start doing it in the Medivial era, you will need 1 or 2 territories to act as population boom centres. You build a hamlet in each one and a port (for food production). Naturally you will want to place the Outpost on a tile that produces a lot of food. The best candidates for such territories are islands with a lot of coastal tiles - a single port will be able to produce 20+ food with no infrastructure buildings.

Once you detach one of your population boom centres, they will start at 0/8 (or 0/24 with both techs researched). If there is no hamlet in that territory, it will be 0/4 and 0/20 accordingly.

If you have about 50+ food production, you will get a pop growth of 1 per turn. What I have noticed is that for some reason the food consumption is not applied on outposts, probably because you can not actually employ the pops, only stockpile them.

Thus in 10 turns you should have about 8 to 10 population in each population boom centre. After that you attach it again to the city and the population is transferred immediately. You can detach it in the same turn to being anew. Keep in mind that detaching is free, so you have 10+ turns to save on money for the Attachment cost.

There are a couple of things to test with this :
- How do districts that remain in the territory work - ordinary districts that only add a specific slot do not increase the population limit for an outpost, but what about the Chinese Congress ?
You can use it to get in theory to 0/28 population limit for detached outposts.
- Is the food consumption per population totally removed for outposts or just severely limited ? We need to see how long does it take for a 50+ food outpost to grow to 20 population for example.
- Do religious tennets keep working on outspots, especially on ports ? If that is the case a maritime religion can be a lot better for growing a huge population instead of chosing Agrarian cultures. You will also have more than enough money by picking maritime civilization for attaching/detaching.

- Will food districts keep exploiting nearby food tiles, adding to the total food production of the outpost ?

Once you detach a territory all specialty districts stop working. Only the outpost itself and the harbor will continue to exploit the land.

The only benefits you keep from districts in a detached territory is a higher population limit due to the bonus worker slots.

- outpost itself is +4

- hamlet is +4

- farm, makers, market, research are +1

- harbor is +0 (unless it is a unique variant that provides worker slots)

Each population in an outpost uses up 1 food per turn.

Once the population limit is reached each extra population will consume another 16 food due to overpopulation.

Religious tennets work on outposts as well (the +2 on water tiles)

All of this info is great, but it’s too much to take in. What do these graphs mean for an actual game? Isn’t there some amount of food surplus that results in a certain pop gain? I read somewhere that 50 surplus gives you 1 pop/2 turns and 100 surplus gives 1 pop each turn, but in practice I often have over 50 food surplus, but I’m only gaining pop in 5+ turns. The other variables may affect how much surplus I have, but do I also need more surplus to gain a pop in later eras or with more total pop?